Most cooks, whether amateur or professional, have accumulated a collection of covered cookware that may range from small saucepans to large soup pots and include many other sizes of pots and pans and containers with lids. Even most of those householders who do not consider themselves real cooks have an assortment of covered containers in which to cook food both on top of a stove and in an oven. Restaurant and other commercial kitchens, moreover, may have very large numbers of pots, pans and other cooking containers. In both situations, the cooking containers and their respective lids must be stored when they are not in use. This problem, moreover, may be compounded by the lack of storage space in many kitchens.
Where and how these kitchen implements are stored may vary substantially from kitchen to kitchen. In some instances, pots and cooking containers are stacked in a nested fashion with the largest diameter pot on the bottom and successively smaller pots on top. While this might be a relatively efficient way to store pots, pans and other cooking vessels such as casseroles, the lids and covers usually cannot be stored effectively in a nested stack. Most kitchens, whether home or commercial, which use this storage method for pots also have a disorganized pile of lids and covers. The cook then must hum through the pile to locate the correct lid for the container he or she wants to use. In a home kitchen this is primarily very frustrating. However, in a commercial kitchen, it can be costly since the time spent hunting for lids is time diverted from cooking or other productive tasks.
Some cooks simply cover their pots and pans with the lids and store them side-by-side, on cabinet shelves. Although this method allows the cook to locate the correct lid quickly, it requires significantly more storage space than stacking or nesting the containers. Many home kitchens simply do not have the storage space to store in this fashion the numbers of cooking containers required by large families or serious cooks. In addition, the side-by-side storage of covered containers is not usually the most effective use of storage space in a commercial kitchen.
The manufacturers of custom kitchen cabinetry for home kitchens typically include a wide range of storage options designed to organize kitchen implements. However, the efficient storage of lids for cooking containers, as far as Applicant is aware, has not been addressed by kitchen cabinet manufacturers. Nor do the manufacturers of commercial kitchen storage equipment appear to have dealt with this problem.
Limited solutions have been proposed by the prior art to solve the lid storage problem. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 601,753 to Kaiser; 1,065,000 to Sarter et at.; 1,266,245 to Fuhrmann; and 1,528,744 to Dix all disclose holders and racks for kitchen articles, including cooking container lids. All of these racks are designed to be used only in a vertical position, preferably hung on a wall. Many kitchens, especially home kitchens, simply do not have the wall space to accommodate such a rack. Additionally, the racks disclosed by Kaiser and Fuhrmann will not hold lids of varying heights. None of the other racks, moreover, provides the adjustability required to store the varied collection of different sizes of cooking container lids and covers found in most home kitchens. Not only are the lids and covers found in most kitchens likely to have different diameters, but the depth and knob height is usually different as well. As a result, a truly useful storage rack must be sufficiently adjustable to hold all of the cook's lids and covers, no matter how varied in size and shape the collection is. None of the racks disclosed in the foregoing patents, moreover, is particularly well adapted to the storage demands of a large commercial kitchen.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,000,326, issued to the inventor herein, discloses an adjustable rack or holder for cooking container lids that provides module elements sized and adjustable to accommodate container lids of different heights. This rack may be used in either a horizontal or a vertical orientation to store container lids. While the lid-holding structure described in this patent overcomes the disadvantages of the aforementioned prior art arrangements, it is not as adjustable enough to accommodate the wide variations in lid size, shape and design common throughout the United States and international marketplace. In addition, the module arrangement described in the Applicant's aforementioned patent is easier for a cabinetmaker than a consumer to assemble to the desired degree of adjustability.
The prior art, therefore, has failed to provide an adjustable storage rack or holder for cooking container lids and covers that may be easily assembled by an experienced cabinetmaker or by a consumer, that may be positioned in one of several convenient orientations in a home or commercial kitchen, and which can be easily adjusted as needed to hold and store a number of lids of varying and different dimensions. Consequently, there is a need for such a rack in both home and commercial kitchens to allow storage areas to be organized effectively and efficiently to reduce clutter and provide the time savings which result when storage spaces are organized.